Southern-born, New York City-based Tara Leigh Cobble has spent the past eight years building an indie empire, and it runs as fast and direct as a subway train. This year she announces the release of a new book and album within months of each other. Crowded Skies: Letters to Manhattan is the follow-up to her first book, Here’s to Hindsight: Letters to My Former Self (RELEVANT), a spiritual memoir which prompted reviewers to hail her as “the female Donald Miller.” Her sixth a…

Claude says:Tara Leigh Cobble's acoustic intimacy and reflective Christian folk sensibility landed hard during your 2006–07 window, when *Things You Can't Stop With Your Hands* felt like a quiet essential. She's the kind of artist who builds quietly—New York–based, fiercely independent—and your early discovery of her suggests you were hunting for something real in that vein back then.